Social Job Search Site InTheDoor.com is a #LeanStartup

Traditional job search sites are spammy and inefficient.  In the real world, when we look for a job, we start by tapping our connections.  We're In The Door, and we show you jobs at your friends' companies.  Users log in with Facebook, we scan for their friends' employer data, tap into a filtered job aggregator database, and with some magic, users can:

• View Companies - See all companies hiring in their network and get an introduction from friend who works there.
• Explore by City - See job opportunities hiring in most popular cities and see friends who live there.
• Search Jobs - Search all jobs in their network by job title, company, and city.

We're using three APIs, scaling a huge database, so we must prioritize our resources to run lean.  Our company is brand new, one product/bizdev, one front-end engineer, one back-end engineer all located in San Francisco, and a Ukranian who does some pretty decent HTML/CSS work for very cheap.  While others were taking twitpics of Ashton in Austin, we were firing away on our computers back at home. 

Eric Ries, the Godfather of lean start-ups, says entrepreneurs must continuously deploy, and also be ready to cut features.  We obtained a $17 lifetime deal for Optimizely back in November, which lets us easily determine if a feature change increases convergence rate, by just inputting a few lines of code. CrazyEgg, which is wrapped into their lean-start-up bundle, enables us to see a heat map of where our users are clicking to provide valuable insight on page layout.

We crowdsourced our logo to 99 designs, getting over 400 submissions [which was great, because they guaranteed us 200], and are glad to pick up a discount with the Appsumo deal.

The lean start-up mentality is the commitment to innovate, to improve, and to push through with what little you've got, to provide value to the customer.  We are launching to the public soon, and ready to obtain more user feedback.